The Witcher is plagiarism - An hour-long rant from Awesome Arizona Metal Autist

[Dang Woodchucks!]

Counterpoint:

"Geralt of Rivia" sounds a hell of a lot cooler than "Elric of Melnibone".

You can always pick out the fantasy authors who came up with their naming conventions by throwing darts at a wall and never once saying the names out loud.

ETA: anyone who spends this much time to stick it to fans of anything is a retard.

How many Deep Purple songs have been written about Geralt?
And how many Blue Öyster Cult songs?
0 for 2.

Blue Oyster Cult did an entire concept album, iirc. You also forget Blind Guardian has a few songs about Elric as well, among a laundry list of other bands

Besides the main character everything else is different - Elric is a tragedy where death is guaranteed if you interact with Elric, Witcher is an overall optimisic story with a large cast of side characters that help Geralt.

This is the bottom line that saves Sapkowski the trouble of only having turbospeds like Danny freaking out and calling him a hack; as many similarities as they have, they ultimately have differe t stories to tell.

It also helps the games only take whats absolutely necessary from the books and fucks off to do it's own thing, and given that's the first piece of media that a lot of people first knew Geralt from, because no one* read the original books, nobody cares what Sapkowski ripped off to start with.

tl;dr It's a big dumb feedback loop of Danny REEEEEEEEEE'ing like a faggot.

*No one that wasn't a nerd, and Polish since a lot of them were only translatef and exported post-Witcher games. Nerd.

 

[Dang Woodchucks!]

Didn't the Japanese rip Elric off to create their White haired Pretty Boy trope, or was there another source for that spergery? Wouldn't surprise me if Sephiroth were a rip off of Elric, down to the big fuck-off sword.

Double-post to explain that you got the wrong FF character; Cecil from FF4 would be the recident Elric-inspired Japanese protagonist.

>Pretty boy
>Cursed Dark Sword (only at the start)
>White hair
>Angst out the wazoo
>Family drama that threatens world

I mean, Sakaguchi, Tokita and Amano were much more tasteful about it, but its there.

 

[Jan Ciągwa]

Sapek (and boy does Sapkowski hate when you call him like that) is pissed at the games for variety of reasons. He sold the rights for less than an average Polish yearly wage at the time. People on convents keep asking questions about the game he didn't played and knows nothing about. His son died recently while he tried and failed to raise money for his medical treatment, selling the rights for "booze money" might haunt him to this day. Sapek is also a wall-to-wall asshole in general who likes to drink like a tanker and make fun of people to their faces, so there's that. He loves his little Witcherverse and hates when people screw around with it or write fanfics. Old fart also thinks vidyagaymz are dumb and that you're dumb for playing them, so there's that, too.

I have not played the games neither read Elric, but I read the books in Polish. What I can say is that the Witcher is 95% plagiarism of Arthurian legends, LotR, Welsh, German, Slavic and all-around European folklore. The biggest influence on the books is actually Ogniem i Mieczem trilogy, which is something Poles treat as their national Gilgamesh and LotR rolled into one, and which is Sapek's favourite book.

There's also the distinction between the 5 core Witcher books which are a continuous epic story and the 2 short story collections. There's a lot of difference in tone and themes between the saga and stories. The general theme is that Geralt protects people by killing monsters, but (demi)humans Geralt is protecting are often more monstrous than the monsters he kills. He named himself of Rivia because stupid peasants he took bounties from thought he was some kind of knight and thus more trustworthy or "noble". There's no "Orded vs. Chaos" in Witcher, just a horde of utterly unlikeable assholes and a few cool dicks screwing each other. The "White Cold" was a metaphor for a next Ice Age; the 3rd game made White Cold into some stupid Azathoth expy.

If Sapek borrowed anything from Western popculture it would be Warhammer Fantasy.

 

[AsbestosFlaygon]

In my opinion plagiarism arguments in general are cringe, it's just people yelling "mY oriGiNl b0o3's b3TtEr1" to make them feel cool. Because for some reason just preferring a different fucking book isn't enough of a reason for a bunch of autists.

You know what you should do if you truly feel that there's actual plagiarism going on?

Sue them yourself, or if you're a pussy tell the author about your concerns and get them to file a lawsuit,

If the argument can survive in court then yes it is, if not then no, simple shit.

 

[melcarba99]

Those are superficial simililarities, you would need to delve deep into storylines and style to call it plagarism. Of course, based on the fact that the witcher author knew about Elric, at least its reasonable to say that Sapkowski took inspiration.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I mean, everything is plagiarism if we go by this standard.

Remember, Star Wars entire opening structure plagiarized some Japanese shit. Hidden Fortress or something?

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Those are superficial simililarities, you would need to delve deep into storylines and style to call it plagarism. Of course, based on the fact that the witcher author knew about Elric, at least its reasonable to say that Sapkowski took inspiration.

It's as much plagiarism as anybody that has elves in forests and dwarves underground.

 

[Jan Ciągwa]

The Witcher plagiarized Berserk manga lol:

1) Both Geralt and Guts are teh best swordsmen evah with speshul swords and both hunt monsters,
2) Both have wolf themes; Guts is a black wolf, Geralt is a white wolf. ORIGINAL CHARACTER DO NOT STEAL - Sapkowski,
3) Both live in a grimderp medieeevil setting,
4) Same raven-haired love interest,
5) Same "Soylent Evil is people!" mindset and cosmology,
6) In the early 90's, Andrzej Sapkowski maybe saw an Berserk issue on a stall in Netherlands where he was working at the time - the same time the first books of the Witcher stories were written,
7) Sapkowski will not even acknowledge even the superficial similarities between Guts and Geralt, while Miura acknowledges Guts' inspirations.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Sapkowski is an arrogant fucking drunk who killed Geralt because he was pissed at his readers and went 'lol a loser with a pitchfork did it. get fucked faggots' and then he promptly vomited over the next girl he was trying to sexually assault. When he woke up from this drunken stupor a bunch of dorky poles said that they wanted to make a videogame off of his work and he laughed, saying 'videogames don't make shit for money you fucking faggots.' He then sold his rights to CD Projekt, in perpetuity, for a single payment of $3,500 USD and 10 cases of bottom shelf vodka. When he woke up from this massive, multi-year bender in a pool of his own vomit and filth, he saw it actually DID make money, and started screaming at CD Projekt to give him more. Apparently being a massive fuck-up hack is illegal in Poland, so CD Projket whimpered and paid him to stop attempting to rape their developers.

He still thinks video-games are shit, promptly got drunk and his fat ass stumbled and broke his con table.

 

[Shitassdeaddude]

I could buy that the Witcher was possibly ripped off of Elric, but it's going to take more than a video full of circumstantial evidence to convince me. Especially because it's pretty much the same thing he did when going to bat for Michael "The Kiddy Diddler" Jackson.

 

[Bum Driller]

Well, having read both the Witcher and Elric sagas, I would say that while there are obvious plagiarisms in Zapkowski's work, they're on a very surface level. Apart from similar terminology, which Zapkowski obviously nicked from elsewhere, not all of it just from Elric, there is very little similarity in the stories themselves or in characters between these two. Geralt is so different as a character from Elric that you hardly register them having the same nicknames, and it's not like either of them can claim to be the original two-handed sword -wielding protagonist anyway.

You could also make the case that both fight heavily drugged, but even in this sense they differ quite a lot. Elric is literally a cripple without his combat drugs, who could barely lift a sword without getting high as kite first, while Geralt is a mutant ninja killing machine even without them. Geralt can cast small spells to aid himself in dire situations, while Elric is the most powerful sorcerer of his setting, easily summoning Lords of Chaos themselves to have a chat with him. While both settings could be labeled as high-fantasy, their tone is also quite different in this regard. The Witcher story is essentially fast-paced merry prankster one, with gritty down-to-earth realism, with flashy magicians and monsters popping up from every nook and cranny, and with witty dialogue. The tone of Elric, on the other hand, is extremely epic, melancholic and cosmic, where magick and mystical creatures are more akin to Lovecraft mythos and where the swordplay is ultimately just a filler to the existential and moral dilemmas Elric goes through.

Also, about the Order/Chaos -dichotomy; this is so used theme in this genre that it's trivial to bring it up. Not only that, but in Witcher it's just a backdrop to the story, mentioned mostly in passing philosophical ponderings of the characters, while in Elric's saga it's the whole fucking plot, with especially the literal representatives of Chaos making personal appearance and being actually somewhat fleshed-out characters.